AOL engineer accused of theft
WASHINGTON – A 24-year-old software engineer at America Online Inc. was arrested Wednesday on federal charges that he hacked into the company’s computers to steal 92 million e-mail addresses that were later sold and used to bombard AOL members with spam.
Jason Smathers, who worked at the company’s Dulles, Va., headquarters, is accused of illegally obtaining the e-mail addresses of nearly all of the Internet provider’s customers in May 2003. Smathers allegedly sold the names for $100,000 to Sean Dunaway, 21, who ran an Internet gambling business in Las Vegas, prosecutors said.
Dunaway then sold the list to unidentified spammers, who used it early this year to send millions of e-mails peddling herbal penile enhancement products, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in New York.
Smathers, who joined AOL in 1999, obtained other AOL member information as well, including telephone numbers, zip codes and the types of credit cards used by members, though not credit card numbers. The company said those numbers are stored in a separate, secure facility.
“I am very, very angry about this,” said Jonathan Miller, AOL’s chief executive, in an e-mail to employees Wednesday. “We will absolutely not tolerate wrongdoing by employees… . We will do everything we can to uncover abuse and assist law enforcement in prosecuting it.”
According to prosecutors, Smathers was not authorized to access AOL’s customer database, which can be viewed by only a small number of employees and is “housed” in secure computers. But in May 2003, Smathers used the computerized employee identification code of another AOL worker to gain entry to the data and compile the lists of AOL’s roughly 30 million users, many of whom maintain more than one screen name.
“I think I found the member database,” Smathers wrote in an instant message to an unidentified person who used the handle The Brews. “There are going to be millions of them so, will take time to extract. I will do them a chunk at a time.”
The informant who alerted AOL to the scheme told investigators that roughly a month after Smathers accessed the data, Dunaway sold him the 92 million names in 26 separate blocks, one for each letter of the alphabet, for $52,000.
The source told investigators that early this year he bought a revised list from Dunaway for roughly $32,500. That list was much smaller, about 18 million screen names, and Dunaway said it was more up-to-date and “a more risky proposition for his AOL insider to obtain” because it had other subscriber data, according to the complaint.
Prosecutors said Dunaway boasted that spamming for his Internet gambling business was earning between $10,000 and $20,000 a day.
The charges against both men include conspiring to transport stolen goods across state lines, gaining unauthorized access to computers and sending out deceptive bulk e-mail with disguised origins.
The two men each face a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.